Aquinas and More Launches Digital Services Site for Catholic Publishers

Aquinas and More Catholic Goods Launches Digital Services Site for Catholic Publishers.

Colorado Springs, CO – Aquinas and More Catholic Goods today officially announced the launch of Catholic Digital Services, a project to assist Catholic publishers with the transition to digital media formats for their products. According to Ian Rutherford, President of Aquinas and More, “We’ve been trying to convince Catholic publishers to take this step for over a year and have seen very little movement so we decided to offer our own expertise to these publishers. With the announcement today by the American Association of Publishers that e-book sales have surpassed paperback sales, this service is needed now more than ever.”

Catholic Digital Services offers hardcopy and pdf conversion to both the Kindle and ePub formats for books and mp3 conversions for CDs as well as consultation services to assist publishers in getting their books into distribution channels. “We started our conversion services in the second quarter of 2010 with the launch of the Aquinas Catholic Classics line of books and decided immediately that this would be a valuable service for our publishers.”

According to a recent article in the National Catholic Register, there isn’t a unified effort among Catholic publishers to make the digital push. Some, like Ignatius Press, have been producing e-books for over a year while others are still deciding how to approach the challenge. According to Rutherford, a large part of the hesitation is skill related. “When we started talking to Catholic publishers a year ago, most hadn’t even begun discussing the issue internally and many admitted that they really had no idea how to move forward on such a major project. Now there is a way for them to do that without having to expend their internal resources on new skills.”

Aquinas and More Catholic Goods is the largest Catholic store on-line and was the first Catholic on-line store to offer digital media for sale and the first to offer its own line of e-books.